A Reward Unto Himself, A Reminder Unto Another

Mumbai, Nov 16: A thought may have travelled far across the globe from here and struck Roger Federer wherever he is: Time to go?

Could there be more to the reason why Federer became the first non-cricketing sportsman to tweet Sachin Tendulkar farewell than just that they have made a habit of meeting during the Championship at Wimbledon each summer? Could it also be the tennis star has sighted in the cricket icon the grey apparition impending closer upon him? Retirement?

Like Sachin, Federer has already moved into the lofty and lonesome manhattan of achievement. He has spared no trophy left to grab. His exploits have defied earthly gravity. His following is its own Christendom. His coffers must cough to suffocation. His mantel must groan with the burden of achievement. His body, like Sachin’s, has begun to reveal that unconquerable thing called age. He’s only 32 to Sachin’s 40, but if modern turns on a brutal treadmill, international tennis is rubber on an F1 lap. It burns you out.

Federer’s down seeded sixth on the ATP charts, behind David Ferrer and Juan Del Potro. He’s lost bouts recurrently to the others who make up the top five: Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovich, Andy Murray. He’s begun to snarl at play and gnash in defeat. He’s unrelenting yet to what his body might tell him. He will give up his serenity and turn to scrapping, if that’s what it’ll take hereon to bark the competition off court. He’s busy banishing approaching ghosts and said somewhere recently he is still planning, as always, 18 months ahead. Which means he’s already thinking Wimbledon 2015. Which may well mean, he’s also mulling what the arrangements of what transpired at the Wankhede this afternoon.

It came to pass that at high noon Sachin soaked up the shadows of a matchless journey under his hat and said goodbye. A tear fell, or several, Sachin will best be able to tell, and became an ellipse of full stops. Game’s end.

A cruelly truncated end, for he may have rightfully bargained on ten last days out on the park and four last outings with the bat. The West Indies were keener on a triumphal sendoff than Sachin probably cared for. They lasted two and three quarter days at Eden and fewer here on Sachin’s home ground. Their woeful deficits made a moth-eaten series of it and ended up robbing Sachin an entire game’s playtime. It was a 2-0 defeat conceded, improbably, in the time it takes to conclude one Test.

This morning, the Best Men of Sachin’s farewell party put some of their calypso abandon on display, but none of the fearsome authority that was as much part of the West Indian credo. They extended lunch, but showed no stomach for a fight. They made a meal of themselves, bowled out for far fewer than Clive Lloyd alone hit up (242) at Wankhede’s inaugural game in January 1975. Lloyd isn’t the size that’s easily concealed, but through the course of this match, the Big Cat may have been looking for a suitable place in the Wankhede pavilion to shake off the blushes.

Came another crown a little later in the day that may have waited on the glow of Sachin’s final tryst with cricket to abate. Intimation with grace is not an undue demand to make on the highest honour this nation bestows on its citizens, a divined moment, a well-lit place, a standout assignation. The Bharat Ratna hurtled off the government’s cooling rooms to join the end of a scrummy beeline extended before Sachin: a commemorative stamp, a BCCI cap, a STAR India trophy, an MCA trophy, a Mumbai Police album, a Sri Lankan government medal, then Bharat Ratna.

The crown Sachin has signed off wearing is mostly the aggregate of his own singular labours; the Bharat Ratna could have displayed lesser haste than to lunge and want itself pinned on it rightaway.

Today, Sachin could have been afforded just his own radiance, just his own easy eloquence which few knew existed until he began to speak, just the gathered rewards of his own realm — a cuddled family, an engaged coach, a praying mother, a father somewhere in the radiance overhead, a fondness of mates past and present, a reclusive mentor-brother somewhere in the shadows, a lachrymose constituency rooted round the stands interminably long after Mohammed Shami had castled Shannon Gabriel and coaxed a Peter Pan cackle of joy from the 40-year-old at square leg. He’d only just retired and was clapping his own curtains down.

PS: If Sachin Tendulkar is synomous with Indian cricket, it remains, hearteningly, on good shoulders: his last lap of honour Sachin concluded borne by two men named Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Virat Kohli. Roger Federer will have to trek off court solo, whenever he calls it quits, and with his own shoulder to carry the kitbag on.

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Published by Sankarshan Thakur

Sankarshan Thakur was born in Patna in 1962 and went to school at St. Xavier's, Patna and St. Xavier's, Delhi. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Political Science from Hindu College, Delhi University, in 1983.
He began his journalistic career with SUNDAY magazine in 1984. He has been Associate Editor with The Telegraph and Indian Express. Before returning to The Telegraph for his second stint in 2009, he was Executive Editor of Tehelka. Thakur is currently The Telegraph's Delhi-based Roving Editor. He has extensively reported Kashmir, Bihar and socio-political conflict in the sub-continent. He is the author of Subaltern Saheb, a political biography of Laloo Yadav. He is currently working on a book on Bihar under Nitish Kumar. He has published monographs on the Kargil War, Pakistan and caste honour killings in Uttar Pradesh.
Contact: sankarshan [dot] thakur [at] gmail [dot] com
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